cinema history class: hell of the living dead (1980)

The session: The Dead are Alive!
Keith shows us four Italian ripoffs of Dawn of the Dead 

As always, there may be spoilers here. And the trailer may be NSFW and/or NSFL.

Week 1: Hell of the Living Dead (1980)
Directed by Bruno Mattei

My Level of Prior Knowledge:
Completely unfamiliar.

Plot Synopsis:
When an accident at a chemical research facility in Papua New Guinea releases a mysterious toxic gas, the dead begin returning to life as flesh-eating zombies. A television news crew investigating the outbreak joins forces with a team of commandos sent to the region. Together, they travel through the jungle, encountering increasingly gruesome scenes of carnage as the infection spreads. As they struggle to survive, they discover that the disaster may be connected to a sinister international effort to address overpopulation.

Reaction and Other Folderol:
There's a lot wrong with this movie. A LOT.

The plot is bizarre, the storytelling is messy, and some of the proceedings are downright silly. There are moments when the movie is ugly, and not necessarily in the way a horror movie is supposed to be ugly. And the whole thing feels like it was cobbled together from pieces of other movies.

The influences are pretty obvious. There's more than a little Cannibal Holocaust in here, along with a generous helping of Apocalypse Now. And, of course, the obligatory George Romero zombie influences. It's almost as though the filmmakers watched a bunch of movies they liked and decided to make all of them at once.

And then there's the stock footage. Lots and lots of stock footage. I understand the desire to establish an exotic jungle setting without actually having to film everything in an exotic jungle. But did we really need all those shots of birds? What was the point? Were the birds somehow involved in the zombie outbreak? Were they conducting surveillance? Did somebody get a terrific deal on a reel of bird footage and decide they were damn well going to use every frame?

Another problem is the storytelling. It reminded me of something that bothers me about a lot of modern action movies. Within any given scene, it's usually perfectly clear what's happening. You know who the characters are, what they're trying to accomplish, and what's standing in their way. But how one scene connects to the next, or how all the scenes fit together into a coherent story, is another matter entirely. The individual pieces make sense. The movie doesn't always.

And the ending? Let's just say I don't think anyone is going to be terribly surprised by how things turn out.

So why did I give this movie a relatively high rating?

Because somewhere in the second half, I noticed something strange.

I was watching another scene in which a group of living people was desperately trying to escape a bunch of zombies. I was still bothered by the movie's incoherence, its silliness, and its general messiness. But I was also completely absorbed in what was happening. I wanted to know how these people were going to get out of this particular predicament. I was on edge. I was genuinely interested in what happened next.

Somehow, despite everything the movie was doing wrong, it had grabbed me.

And that's not nothing.

I should also give credit to the makeup effects, which are excellent. The zombies look appropriately revolting, and there's some genuinely impressive gruesomeness on display.

Ultimately, Hell of the Living Dead is a badly assembled, frequently ridiculous, sometimes irritating movie. But it's also a movie that managed to hold my attention and generate real suspense, even while I was mentally cataloging its many shortcomings.

I can't call it a good movie. But I can't dismiss it as a bad one, either.

Sometimes a movie doesn't have to make much sense to work. Sometimes it just has to make you want to see what happens next.

And, against considerable odds, this one did.

And the strangest thing of all? Joe...Joe, of all people, gave it a 5!